Items of Interest

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When I talk about web performance, I like to use the phrase, “weight does not need to increase wait.” To be clear, that’s not because the weight of a webpage doesn’t matter—it most definitely does—but rather because we can often (usually, even) deliver a usable representation of a web page’s content very quickly, even if that page is quite large and asset-heavy as a whole. At the root of this distinction is a performance metric that the web community has only recently begun to discuss and prioritize, known as perceived performance.

When the police repeat that ‘they are in fear for their lives’ every time they shoot and/or kill a Black person, I think that we must take them at their word. Blackness poses an existential threat which must be destroyed. History attests to this reality. How else are we to understand the relentless, consistent, unending obliteration of Black people by the state over decades and centuries? Even after being shot 8 times, checked to make sure we aren’t breathing, the cops still chain our dead bodies with handcuffs. That behavior can only make sense if we understand blackness to be a perpetual threat to whiteness.

Setting as crisis — the street and its many offerings of knowledge and myth, the politics hidden in daily happenstance – is really a question of context. This is what we sci-fi/fantasy people call worldbuilding, but every genre has work to do in constructing layers of universe around a narrative. When we speak about context, we’re looking at something beyond the simple fact of setting. Setting is a place and a time, but when we add the complications of power, politics, privilege – then we are beginning to build a rich, nuanced environment to deploy our characters across. This is context.

use design as a secret disguise to infiltrate whatever world you want to go into. If you do that over and over again, and then translate that interest and curiosity into the work that you’re doing, you’ll do great.

The web is the universal information platform. It doesn’t matter if somebody visits a website on a $2,000 iMac, or a $50 Android tablet, or the $5 web client of a future we can’t even imagine yet—in theory, at least. In practice, it’s important to make sure that we don’t sacrifice the experiences of a small number of users just so we can slightly improve the experiences of the rest, damaging the universal nature of the web in the process.

Once you identify that your product or service meets the criteria of a high-consideration purchase, you have to ask yourself if your funnel truly supports the needs associated with these characteristics. Fear and uncertainty dominate the emotional state of someone being asked to part with large amounts of money for something they don’t fully understand.